Seizing the opportunity to gain political campaign experience

Working as a strategy consultant during the COVID-19 pandemic, Danni Bianco discovered a passion for navigating the intersection of the private and public sectors. 

When tasked with coordinating with private sector, government, and university partners to understand what types of interventions could address the crisis, she quickly realized there are few people who can successfully traverse this complex landscape.

“Not many people have the experience of working across sectors, so they don’t fully understand the competing incentives or what avenues to pursue to get the work done. People can be either very business- or very public sector-minded,” Bianco explains. “I felt like we could do a lot more if we had the right expertise bridging these different perspectives, but I did not have that experience at the time.”

A desire to gain that cross-sector perspective is what led her to concurrently pursue a Master in Public Administration (MPA) at HKS and a Master of Business Administration at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Here at HKS, she has appreciated the opportunity to take courses on topics such as adaptive leadership and social movements.

“HKS has given me a new way of thinking,” she reflects. “There’s a focus on leadership here that takes a different approach than in business school or in the corporate world. It’s less about being a leader by taking charge and more about practicing leadership to enable others to act.”

When faced with the decision of how to spend her second summer in the concurrent degree program, she seized the opportunity to gain political campaign experience.

“I had already done a corporate internship my first summer and had not worked in the political sphere at all before that,” Bianco says. “I had no idea what I could give to a campaign, but I knew early on that I wanted to give my time and energy during this consequential election cycle. I started looking at races early last fall, knowing HKS was the place for me to make the necessary connections.”

She organized coffee chats with HKS classmates who had political experience and reached out to alumni. She applied to various races at the state and national levels and landed a role working for the 2024 Biden-Harris presidential re-election campaign. In her role, she served as a liaison between the campaign’s national headquarters and various battleground states.

“It was our job to help states implement cohesive programs despite the fact that each state is has to do things in a way that works for their constituencies, priorities, and their political realities,” she explains.

Bianco was enjoying a rare afternoon off at the movie theater when U.S. President Joe Biden announced on July 21, 2024 he was stepping down from the race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.  She sprinted out of the theatre to take a call from her boss and quickly got to work. In the days that followed, Bianco says the campaign—then the Harris campaign—saw a “massive surge of enthusiasm.”

“We weren’t structurally built for that at the time,” she says. “We had to prepare states to take on way more capacity.”

Now back at HKS for her final year of the MPA Program, Bianco says the community she found here has been the most impactful part of her academic journey. Between social activities ranging from coffee chats and dinner parties to baseball games and poetry readings, Bianco says her social calendar is “genuinely packed.”

“Getting to know my classmates—what they have accomplished, where they want to go next, and who they are as people—has been the most transformational part of this entire experience,” she reflects. One benefit, she says, is that her classmates have been instrumental in helping her find strengths.

“Being around so many impressive people has shown me what greatness really looks like and has also helped me to find the things I’m uniquely suited for,” she says. “It helps that our cohort is good at articulating those strengths for one another.  It’s made me see myself in such a different light.”

She admits her journey is not yet over.

“This place does not hold all the answers,” she says. “In fact, you will probably leave with more questions than anything else. But what HKS did was make me okay with that. I’m excited to start chasing the answers to these new questions.”